Pre-installed apps where you can't disable them or revoke their permissions are a cancer on the Android ecosystem. Especially fun when they have permissions like "access the filesystem" or "obtain device location" or "send notifications".

As some others have mentioned, this is not true at all for phones like Pixel at least.

Last I checked, I had to provide permission to each app that came in the phone. I can deny access to location to even Google Maps.

I think Google largely went wrong with Pixel 4 hardware, but my three year old Pixel 2 still runs sharp and I have always wondered why it didn't grab a bigger share of Android pie.

This is about tracking via gps. Exactly the same rules as Google play.

With android the tracking is baked into the OS, I'd worry about that before worrying about apps with less permissions.

On Android, you can deny permissions to preinstalled apps (I just verified this myself) or even disable the apps entirely, which unlinks all entry points into the app. On iOS, they just sit there sucking up your data like iMessage keeping track of everybody you message.

With a user controlled Android phone, you can just feed apps you don't trust fake location data. But now Google has started restricting user-owned Android to a fixed number of flashes or something, or they get locked out of Google Play Services.